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Category Archives: Puppet

Austin will get a double dose of Puppet this month on March 10th. Puppet Labs will be in town hosting their 2nd Puppet Camp Austin and afterward we will continue the evening with the Austin Puppet Users Group meetup.

Puppet Camps are one-day, regional events held around the world for people who are currently using or interested in using Puppet. You will have the opportunity to talk to a diverse group of Puppet users, benefit from presentations delivered by prominent community members, share experiences, and discuss potential implementations of Puppet with your peers.

While both new and experienced Puppet users are welcome to attend, the presentations are geared slightly more toward beginners. More experienced users can still benefit from the presentations and networking with other Puppet users.

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This post is more of an introduction to a journey of sorts to get thinking about DevOps in an Oracle eBusiness (Financials/CRM) type infrastructure and I plan on developing these posts over time with more details; incorporating feedback on the goal, designs, components and concerns and just as importantly, I hope to collaborate on these ideas to incorporate non Oracle tools. It’s extremely important (at least to me!) to leverage the existing tools whenever and however possible so that Oracle doesn’t remain a perpetual silo no one else wants to touch!

Back story about me: I started out supporting Oracle eBusiness Suite in the late 90s, running 10.7 NCA, 11.0.3, every release of 11.5.x and currently supporting a 12.1 environment while trying to plan ahead to R12.2. I’ve supported Oracle eBusiness on AIX, HPUX, Linux, Windows and Solaris environments over the years – through custom processes, oracle best practices to integrating with ITIL tools (Mercury Interactive at the time). I even spent a while working for Oracle themselves supporting implementations for higher education & healthcare verticals. I’ve seen it, I’ve done it, I’ve broken it, I’ve fixed it, and I have a lot of stories to share about it 🙂

Just how do you do DevOps with eBusiness suite (and similar COTS systems)?

How do you unit test?

How do you load test?

Do you push code to production?

How do you provide developers access?

What does the process look and feel like?

What about Business Analysts?

Audits?

Performance?

Availability?

feedback loops!

Components:

The components I use to build my “Enterprise Devops Pattern” for eBusiness Suite.

Oracle eBusiness Suite

Oracle RDBMS

Oracle iAS/Weblogic

Oracle Application Testing Suite

Oracle Cloud Control

Oracle Linux

Puppet, PuppetDB & Foreman

VMware

Processes:

What are the common processes we can leverage, optimize and built trust upon to greatly reduce systems complexity?

Patching

Project work

Customizations

Cloning

Automation

Interfaces

Integrations

….

Putting it together

How do we build a system that embraces trust, is reliable and performant? How do we test and prove our value stream?

Measuring

Experimenting

Audit defense

Monitoring.. testing..

Feedback loops

Reporting..

As you can see, just by starting to list out bullet points, the complexity of the eBusiness suite starts to rear its ugly head. One quickly realizes that while the eBusiness suite is comprised of hundreds of connected “Applications” (AR, AP, GL, CRM, and FA so on and so forth) it really is its own “system” that Oracle has built and bolted on to over the years. By thinking of it in terms of systems, we can start to see how we can apply DevOps values into the system to solve issues that plague the system by and large – Complexity, Mean times to do anything, long project cycles, operational silos, skill silos, deep reliance on vendor support and so much more.

I hope to see people join me on this journey, share their ideas & experiences and challenge my assumptions. The end goal is absolutely a “cookbook” of ideas to bridge the Oracle Financials “monstrosity” (for lack of better word) into a DevOps value stream.

In opening the proverbial flood gates, I want to speak to you – the people implementing, supporting, planning, patching eBusiness suite and see what you are doing. I want to hear from Vendors working on solutions, from groups developing custom solutions to open source projects that can be used to help provide the tools for change and help consolidate some of this data to report back and share.

So please, contact me through my Blog, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Plus, e-mail or phone. Let’s talk! BTW, This work will be shared here and on the DevOps Enterprise Patterns group I’ve volunteered to assist Gene Kim with as well. Please join us there!